The GNOME team has released version 2.30 of their open source desktop environment. "The GNOME Project's focus on users and usability continues in GNOME 2.30 with its hundreds of bug fixes and user-requested improvements. The sheer number of enhancements makes it impossible to list every change and improvement made."

I wonder the same. Nothing against Mono (I actually find it a great piece of software), but the lesser dependencies the better.

I don't like Mono myself. Not because of the possible patent issues etc as they aren't valid here anyway, but because of the fact that Mono takes so much memory if you only run one or two Mono apps; it always has to load the VM and all that crap. It'd be less of an issue if I used 5+ Mono apps all the time as the VM is shared by all of them, but that's just not the case :S

I don't sweep the patent issues aside, but only time will tell what happens there.

My big issues are with applications written in mono/Java. I'm not sure it's the VM themselves that is the problem so much as the mindset it puts people in. Memory use isn't their problem anymore, and if the application is slow, it's the languages fault. I've met too many managed programmers unable to understand things in terms the computer does, i.e. data and instructions. They can only think in terms of objects. Worse still, those who think C++ or C is like assembler was. The gap in productivity between C or C++ and assembler is massive compared with the cap between C or C++ and a managed byte code language. There is no comparison. Even worse, thinking it's not worth learning any lower language then the byte coded language as the future will be byte coded languages. The language allows them to stay ignorant, their beliefs keeps them so. Byte code as the one true way of the future has been stated for a long time, and this future never happened. I suppose you could argue that with microcode x86 is now a form of low level byte code, but that's pushing it and I think x86 is suffering against ARM because of that when power foot prints matter more than Windows compatibility. Besides, if you do argue that's byte code, you can't argue it's managed. So it's like LLVM, which I have less of a problem with.

I feel the results seams to speak for themselves. Even if the application isn't eating memory like it's the most important app running, they all to often are unresponsive and take ages to start. I'll stick with C or C++ applications, or python applications stuck together from libs written in C or C++. Don't see why .NET/mono byte code "future" will be any more successful then the Java byte code future was.

I feel the results seams to speak for themselves. Even if the application isn't eating memory like it's the most important app running, they all to often are unresponsive and take ages to start. I'll stick with C or C++ applications

I think the patent issues, while not a non-issue, are, like you said, not extremely relevant. However, do keep in mind that Mono is only as useful as it is recent when compared to .NET. Should Microsoft desire to cripple Mono, they have a few billion dollars more that they can spend on developing features faster than the Mono team can possibly keep up. Mono lives at the whim of Microsoft so long as they control .NET development.

I'll be honest and say that I love .NET's more sane organization of standard libraries (over Java, and especially over every other language) and elegant syntax. But for that reason, I use Vala for much of my hobby projects.

Vala's got a very similar syntax, plus language bindings are a non-issue. I don't have to wait for the Mono team to decide to write a native port of my favorite C library. I don't have to write and maintain complicated wrapper code. At the worst, I can draw up a simple text file and valac does the Vala->C translation for me.

Add to that the fact that it runs about as fast as hand-crafted C, and you've got the best of all worlds.